Christmas

Every Christmas Eve for the past 15 years, we've had a huge family get together at my, and then our, house. In 2006, Bob decided we would go to Europe instead, and in 2007, we did.

We flew into DeGualle on Christmas Eve and attended midnight mass at a neighborhood church off the Opera Cadet. Outside our hotel were all the neighborhood accruments: grocer, cheese shop (black, moldy and soupy), hairdresser, chemist, lingerie. Corri had jet lag so we went shopping-

We went to The Disney Resort on Christmas Day, which was a huge amout of fun becuase of all the family time we've spent at Florida Resorts. Then we fended off gypsies to see the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph, Louve, Notre Dame, and the Champs D'Elysee where we went to the cinema to see "Gone Baby Gone." We also spent a fruitless night, searching the subways for the right connection to Cemetaite Pere LeChaise to take a picture of Morrison's grave for Cassi (and Wilde for me). We went by the Bastille, too.

We took the bullet train to London, which Corri loved. We went to the hude sale at Harrad's and she tried on a thousand pound dress. The dressing rooms are communal even in such a posh store. She was thrilled to find an H & M store and we spent an hour searching Carnaby street for Abercombie and Fitch. We took double decker buses everywhere and we were squashed. Not even in NYC have I seen such packed streets. The highlight for me was seeing Van Gough's "Sunflowers" at the National Gallery. We stayed in South Kensington, which was very nice and got a room upgrade because the heat didn't work the first night. There was a grocery store down the street and we all got our last good haircuts a block from there.

We went to Bath for New Years to visi Bob's friends Martin and Jackie. They own a bed and breackfast, Priory Cottage, which was a stone house a couple hundred years old with an auger for a stove, very cool. I'd never seen the Roman baths, and we had a cream tea at Jane Austen's tea room. After a delicious English roast, we played Buzz New Year's Eve and went outside at midnight to watch the fireworks from the hotel across the street. On the way to the airport, we saw Stonehenge.

The memory of that wonderful vacation is a little faded now, but I do recall how quickly Bob learned the subway and bus systems and navigated us with no trouble at all. Also, he kept volunteering to take pictures for tourists with their cameras; then he'd snap a shot of me and Courtney. All over the world, people are scanning their vacation pics and seeing me and Courtney waving at them and wondering "Who are these strange people?"